Today I want to talk to you about how to make micro content and what it exactly it is.
So the other day I did a live video and in it I was talking about micro content briefly
and I thought to myself after, I wonder how many people actually don't know what micro
content is.
I mean, given the name of it we can kind of figure it out but I thought I would create
a video on it and just help you understand a little bit better about what it is, why
we use and how to go about creating it.
So just to give you a little bit of an insight - one of the ways that I work with a lot of
my social media clients is each week I try and have a theme with them or I try and create
a theme out of content that I have from them.
I do a lot of video with my clients so we do pre prepare a lot of the video and I try
and theme everything around that.
So I look at the main video that we make as say a pillar piece of content and what I mean
by that is, you know it's generally the longest piece of content, it's got the most information
in it and then everything else we create in that week tends to point back to that piece
of pillar content, or is a message that we've pulled out of that pillar content.
There are a few exceptions, I know some of my clients might see this and go 'you don't
do that for me' but yes, there are a few exceptions.
But for the most part that's how I try and operate to not only keep things simple but
also to not confuse the audience.
So if some of the audience gets this bit of information this week and some of them get
this bit of information this week, it kind of all points back to a core message.
So, as I eluded to before our core pillar content tends to have a lot of little nuggets
throughout, a lot of pieces of gold that we can pull out and treat as stand alone content
and the reason why this has become important and the reason why we do this is you think
about the social media platforms in general and the trends that have been happening and
we see that there's 10 second video, there's 15 second video, there's 30, 60 second video,
there's images, there's 140 character tweets - now 280 characters.
The point is is that the content is smaller and bite sized because people are time poor.
They're also fatigued with the amount of content.
So the way I like to look at micro content is not only just about a time stamp on it,
make it short and snappy, I like to think 'how do we get rid of all the fluff and just
get to the heart of the matter?'
What is the quickest way to say what we need to say, get in and get out.
So that might be with an image, that might be with a video, that might be with a question,
that might be with text.
Any way you look at it, the point is that you're delivering a nugget of information
in a bite sized way.
People can consume it and move on with their life.
So now that we've looked at what is micro content and why do we use it let's look at
the how and this is going to be pretty quick.
The premise of this is basically which platforms do you exist on and do you like using it?
And what does the platform dictate of you?
So for example, if you're on Instagram you pretty much only have a couple of options.
You can post a photo or you can post a video that's up to 60 seconds and then in Instagram
stories you only have 15 seconds to create a video.
And yes, there are ways to hack the system, you can put something longer together using
certain apps that are around or if you know how to use something like Adobe Premiere Pro
you can create a story out of that but essentially you only have limited variations of content
you can create for that platform so you just have to figure out what you wanna do and how
you will create it.
What I love about using video as your pillar piece of content is if you can edit or you
have a team that can edit for you, you can literally put video on every platform.
You just need to make something that is meaty and hearty for your audience and then you
can go in and you can pick it apart and make it relevant for Instagram, optimise it
for instagram.
Figure out something that you say that's particularly helpful or useful or inspiring and turn that
into a quote.
You can put nuggets out on LinkedIn.
You can put them on Twitter, you can put them on Facebook.
It really is up to you to figure out what that piece of gold is and then distribute
it.
And you don't need to distribute it in the form that it was originally given in.
So, as I suggested before maybe you said it in a video but now you can turn it into text
or you can find a way to turn it into an image but that is how you create micro content.
Have one main piece of content and learn how to pull multiple pieces out of it.
So I hope that's given you a better understanding of what micro content is.
I wanna know in the contents below, do you already create micro content or has this helped
you out?
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There's tonnes more video coming out this month and this year and if you want to see
the schedule for it, you can go to our Facebook page at Eleven Lights Media and I've got a
schedule there of all the videos we've got coming out on YouTube this month.